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Project management is an important part of many disciplines, even outside the discipline of corporate management. In the context of change management, the naming of tasks, responsibilities, deadlines, and resources provides above all the necessary orientation. Because of the strategic importance of corporate change, the most capable people should always be appointed to projects, not those who are currently available. In addition to professional project planning, the integration of project team members is also of crucial importance. In order to receive sufficient support both internally and externally, the importance of the project and the successes achieved should be marketed aggressively. When it comes to successes, care must be taken to select those measures from the multitude of possible sub-projects that lead to so-called quick wins, that is, rapid implementation successes. The management of the diverse activities in the context of a large-scale corporate change must be entrusted to a professional project structure organization with a steering committee and, if necessary, a project management office. So-called agile project management methods are particularly suitable for the flexible and participative implementation of the visions underlying the change.

This chapter is dedicated to project strategy and performances. Traditional approaches and new competence-based theories are presented. The PM strategies regard output complexity (variety and innovation degree), project scope (in terms of supplier involvement, commonality and carry-over parts), and property of specifications. The multi-project strategies are also presented. Finally performances are considered, at the single project level and portfolio level.

Project Management (PM) as a process-based methodology is presented. A project is an organizational process. The characteristics and performances of a project are outlined. PM is considered opposite to Operations Management (PM). Three different types of projects can be identified: (1) product/process innovation (design and development of new products and services), (2) engineer-to-order or engineering and construction contracting, and (3) strategic, organizational and managerial change.

This chapter is at the core of Project Management. Starting from the Project Charter and Project Scope, the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) for ECC companies is addressed, together with good practices to make it. The linkages with other structures, such as OBS and BBS, are defined. The methodological steps of planning, control and reporting are presented, involving the variables of Time, Resources and Costs.

This chapter regards project Quality management: designing with customers (value-based), designing with suppliers, the design for manufacturability and assembly, reducing internal variety, and using simultaneous and reverse engineering.

This chapter is dedicated to project Time management. It begins with the visual representations of Gantt charts and network diagrams. Then all the network techniques are presented: CPM, PERT, GERT, VERT, with examples and exercises.

This chapters concerns project organization and human resource management. With a company-wide approach, organizational structures (matrices etc.) for PM are considered. Particular attention is paid to the role and profession of Project Manager. Resource assignment, work calculation and work loading are finally treated.

This paper introduces the results whether humans are able to develop project plans with a high quality for the well-established Multi-criteria Resource-Constrained Project Scheduling Problem (RCPSP). To analyse this, an empirical study was conducted in which activities had to be serialized or parallelized in the plan, process steps had to be inserted or removed and durations as well as resource requirements had to be modified dynamically during planning. In contrast to this human based planning, a specific multicriteria evolutionary metaheuristic is presented that identifies human compatible plans to relatively large project management problems within a reasonable period of time. To evaluate the level of human competitiveness, a metric for measuring plan quality and the results of the empirical study are presented. The results derived from data of 100 participants and the metaheuristic show that only very few people were able to identify optimal solutions. Furthermore, humans are focusing on one target criteria when solving conflicting planning objectives.

The planning, construction and operation of Germany’s first offshore test field, Alpha Ventus, was a protracted process, because offshore wind farms costing hundreds of millions is uncertain territory for investors, banks and insurance companies. A project planning company initially planned the Borkum West wind farm in the late 1990s. The building permit was then acquired by the Offshore Wind Energy Foundation, which in turn leased the rights of use to an energy industry consortium consisting of E.ON, EWE and Vattenfall on condition that it actively supported the research in the test field. The Alpha Ventus test field, with 12 five-megawatt-class turbines, was erected, and officially inaugurated in April 2010. In addition to electricity production – sufficient for over 50,000 households – Alpha Ventus has also become home to the RAVE Initiative scientists and their research projects. Of everything that has been learned from Alpha Ventus, the main lesson is that it really was a joint effort.

On the basis of the framework for going international and the selected location–operation mode combinations for the activity bundles, this chapter explains the development of a strategy for relocating production and sourcing activities and formulating the relocation project plans. The strategy for going international for production and sourcing shows the target location–operation mode combinations for the activity bundles, fixes the order in which these relocations are carried out and defines quantitative objectives namely cost saving targets. The relocation project plans detail the relocations of the activity bundles, show the expected economic results and define the required budgets. After general explanations, a process to develop the strategy and the project plans is proposed.

Complex and knowledge intensive innovation, engineering and service projects are important for companies to improve their market performance. Project planning and scheduling, resource assignment and cost planning set pointers for a successful project implementation. Due to complex interdependencies between project activities and resources, increasingly less project managers are able to deal with the complex and latent uncertainties of the planning process. Discrete event, Monte Carlo simulation seems to be a promising approach to comply with the requirements of realistic planning and scheduling of complex projects. In this paper an activity-oriented, personnel-integrated simulation model is presented facilitating project managers to model and simulate the schedule of weakly-structured complex projects like engineering and service projects and, thus, evaluate the strengths and weaknesses as well as opportunities and risks of these projects. Two explorative industry case studies in the chemical industry and metal processing industry are presented to demonstrate successful operational application of the simulation-based project planning and scheduling approach and the potential of respective project risk assessment.

Project scope refers to the work to be completed for achieving the project objectives. This is an era that demands are changing constantly and customers perceive that it is their rights to change their demands. As a result, it is more challenging to control the project scope where more creativity is required.

In most companies, short and medium term plans are produced or reviewed on an annual basis. Planning guidelines or traditional practices determine at what point in the year a specific plan is developed or updated, how this work is done and who is involved in it. Because of this experience with short and medium term planning, most managers associate planning with a regularly, almost routinely occurring activity. It would be problematic to understand and manage strategic planning in this way. Decisions about markets, competitive strategies or investments in key resources are much too important to be approached in a routine manner. Strategic decisions

As the social environment begins to create more awareness in the area of conserving the natural environment, a new generation of building has emerged. A trend of constructing buildings that minimise impacts on the environment has been established in the construction industry. Therefore, suitable project management practices have been adopted to efficiently manage the construction of these green buildings. This study aims at investigating practices of project management in traditional and accredited green construction projects, with the purpose of discovering if Green Project Management (GPM) practices can be applied to traditional projects to achieve more successful outcomes. The process of GPM contains what applied to traditional projects, could possibly result in benefits in terms of budget control and constructability. Currently the construction industry has been known to suffer difficulties within these areas; therefore GPM practices could possibly hold a solution to these common problems. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

There is no generally accepted definition of what we mean when we use the terms “project”. Different organisations define projects in different ways. But if we look carefully for points that projects have in common, we can identify the following features

In recent years, the pace of change and the complexity of the business environment have increased rapidly. And this has often left operational structures outdated, no longer suitable for the new challenges. Existing organisations are often fragmented, their structures too hierarchical. This gets in the way of quick decision making, and makes interdisciplinary teamwork difficult. In situations like these, using established procedures to manage projects is rarely a recipe for success. We need new organisational forms and structures in order to facilitate more efficient management and communication, new forms and structures that are suitable for the challenges of modern business life.

Successful management of software projects requires both theoretical project management knowledge as well as practical reality-like management experiences. Simulation Based Training provides a hands-on approach to explore the complexity of managing projects through rapid and inexpensive experimentation. Most of the existing project simulation game focuses only on the management of time, scope, cost, and human resource. There are relatively fewer products which focus on project stakeholder management, communication management and quality management.